


and we hate your whole crew

by lattely



Series: snippets from a lover's calendar [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Captain America Steve Rogers/Modern Bucky Barnes, Homophobia, Interviews, M/M, Press and Tabloids, Sassy Steve Rogers, Shrunkyclunks, Social Media, steve is taking none of your bs hun, there's really no tags for this so i'm just winging it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-04
Updated: 2019-04-04
Packaged: 2020-01-04 20:54:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18351512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lattely/pseuds/lattely
Summary: “That so-called ‘healthy relationship’ goes directly against God. Captain,” she grits out, the title obviously an afterthought meant to paint her as more courteous than she is. Steve chuckles dryly; if he got a penny for each time he’s heard that, he’d easily double Stark’s fortune.He stopped believing in the Savior up in the sky with the very second of his mother’s untimely death, so Steve finds it exceptionally easy to drawl, “Then you can go tell him yourself that I’ll happily go to Hell if it means I get to be with my fella in peace.”





	and we hate your whole crew

**Author's Note:**

> I've always loved those 'Steve versus The Press' fics, so, uh. Here we are, I guess.
> 
> Thank you to the fantastic [River](http://lesbuchanan.tumblr.com) for the instant beta and their never-ending encouragament.
> 
> If you haven't read the previous installment of this series and are confused as to why Bucky's a college student, fear not - he's twenty six.
> 
> Title is, obviously, from Lily Allen's marvelous song _Fuck You_.

“I really don’t get why I need to do this,” Steve says, frowning at the sallow technician fumbling to pin a mic pack onto his belt. It’s before ten in the morning on the third day of a brand new year, and standing backstage of one of the Tower’s multiple conference rooms, squished into a pressed suit, is the second to last thing Steve would pick as a favored pastime on a chainmail questionnaire. The very last position being picking up the trash littering Brighton Beach with his teeth.

“I wish you wouldn’t have to, but we need to chastise the press,” Pepper says with an apologetic sigh. She’s wearing an immaculately tailored navy pantsuit paired with murder-weapon stilettos that make her just a couple inches short of looming over Steve. Her hair is swept smoothly back into a ponytail, and to Steve’s annoyance and awe, she looks nothing like she’s thinking about lying down on the floor to nap right this second, suspicious stickiness be damned. “It’s not every day that a national icon comes out as anything other than the heterosexual binary. I really am sorry.”

She’s always so earnest, Steve can’t find it in himself to be angry at her. He quirks a forced smile. “It’s not your fault some people still live in the Stone Age.”

“Exactly,” she huffs in weary amusement.

Apparently, when Steve was oblivious spending Christmas Eve and the best part of the following day with Bucky in the safe haven of his apartment, some busybody with an unsatisfactory income sold blurry cellphone pictures of the kisses they shared in the airport to TMZ. It was all it took to unleash a full-blown media shitstorm - the photographs were splashed over every existing newspaper’s front page within twelve hours. So now, instead of cuddling his newly-acquired boyfriend in bed, Steve is dressed up like a dog’s dinner to lecture Fox on the virtue of minding their own business, nearly a week after the whole thing should’ve blown over but naturally hasn’t.

“We’re going live in five minutes, Ms Potts,” a young woman in a headset says to Pepper as she jogs by, clipboard in hand. Because _of course_ the debacle is going live, that’s how much someone up in the sky hates Steve’s guts.

“You’re all set, Captain,” the tech still dabbling with Steve’s belt says promptly. Pepper dismisses the guy with a swift nod.

“Do I remember correctly that you mentioned your boyfriend would come?” She says once the tech has disappeared in the small crowd. Steve dons an instant smile at the mention of Bucky. In the morning, he promised to stop by the Tower in the tight sliver of time before Steve’s battle with the tabloids, to raise morale and maybe listen to the first few minutes of the interview. Bucky’s Christmas break ends on the seventh of January, and before then, he has to tie up all loose ends remaining in the five-page essay he’s writing for his Biomedical Imaging course, but, in his own words, he’ll always find a second to steal a kiss or two from the mighty Captain America.

“Yeah,” Steve says sheepishly, rubbing the back of his head. “He’s-”

As if on cue, Bucky chooses that moment to pop his head in a distant propped-open doorway, exactly in Steve’s line of sight.

Bucky’s hair is windblown, cheeks pinched pink from the cold, and under his coat, he’s wearing a striped black crewneck, one of his favorites, that he had on yesterday. From experience, Steve knows it’s worn soft from years of use, just the safe side of threadbare around the elbows and the collar.

“Buck!” Steve calls, and as Bucky looks over, Steve gives a small wave. Some of the tech support and PR people glance his way, bounced out of their grim workplace momentum, but he couldn’t care less, not with his grinning boyfriend sauntering towards him, handsome enough to eat like a cookie straight from the pan.

“Hi, baby,” Steve says when Bucky, smelling fantastic as ever, of tangerines and lavender, comes in for a brief kiss Steve happily delivers. If he draws it out a second longer than necessary, sue him. He’s in the celebrity equivalent of detention, he might as well make a bit of a show.

More people are definitely looking now - Bucky is, after all, part of the reason they’re all here.

After Bucky steps back, Steve smooths down the lapels of his suit jacket and smiles at Pepper, who’s standing politely off to the side with a warm expression on her face as Bucky slides his hand into Steve’s and tangles their fingers together. She looks almost fond, as though Steve is her lonely favorite cousin who’s finally brought a date to a family reunion.

“Pepper, this is Bucky, my boyfriend,” he says, wanting to quickly get the first introductions over with. “Bucky, meet my friend Pepper.”

Steve doesn’t mention the small happy twitch of Pepper’s mouth when he calls her a friend.

“It’s an honor, ma’am,” Bucky says earnestly, shaking Pepper’s proffered hand. She smiles broader than Steve’s ever seen her with the exception of the time Tony forgot about April Fools and got a bucket of orange soda dumped on him from the ceiling for his trouble.

“Please, call me Pepper. ‘Ma’am’ makes me feel old,” she says. “From what I’ve been told, Steve is crazy about you,” she adds under the pretense of small talk, and Steve’s cheeks are suddenly fucking _aflame_ like the Library of Alexandria after one of Caesar’s hissy fits.

“Well, it’s hard not to be crazy about me,” Bucky jokes, exaggerating the gesture of tossing an imaginary mane of hair over his shoulder, but his fingers tighten around Steve’s the second the words are out of Pepper’s mouth; a silent _likewise_ meant just for the two of them.

“We’re going on air in one minute, Ms Potts,” another lady, this time a well-built Filipino woman in an all-black suit, who Steve distinctly remembers crossing the Tower’s lower level corridors when he’s been called down to consult one of the Avengers’ numerous representatives, appears beside them. “If you’ll follow me to the stage, Captain?”

“Of course,” Steve sighs; the Final Judgement has dawned. He turns to Bucky and tugs him in close, stroking his cheek as he kisses him hurriedly, eager for a boost of confidence but unwilling to piss any of Stark’s lawyers off more than needed by dragging his feet.

“You’re gonna ace it,” Bucky assures, patting Steve’s chest after they part.

“It’s all going to be fine,” Pepper joins in. Steve shoots them both a faint smile as he’s led away by the Filipino lady, adjusting the earpiece he’s been made to wear so he’ll be granted verbal backup from the PR team in case shit goes sideways.

The conference room is bursting at the seams, journalists filling every available seat, those who weren’t so lucky as to call dibs on a chair standing where the space allows it. There’s not a single inch of floor left unoccupied, and the noise buds accordingly - it’s like a goddamn arena right before Beyoncé steps on stage, the clamor of voices so loud Steve worries he might burst a blood vessel.

When the Filipino woman (her name is Tala, Steve now recalls) leads him onto the podium that makes him feel as though he’s the fucking President and not a dude who carries a garish shield to battle, the reporters go absolutely buckwild, shouting over themselves in a fight to get his attention.

Steve has always hated those gatherings, where all the Avengers are shepherded into a cramped room and thrown at the mercy of invasive questions and constantly running dictaphones. It feels like they’re zoo animals, put out for people to stare and prod where they shouldn’t.

As Steve sits down, trying not to disturb the microphones arranged in a semi-circle on the table in front of him, that are there just as props (the real thing is pinned to his shirt collar), Tala holds out her arms, palms facing down, and slowly lowers them. Steve gains a whole new level of admiration for her when the crowd immediately falls silent.

“Welcome,” she says curtly, voice leveled to a cool monotone. A handful of people in the front row wither under her sweeping gaze. “Captain Rogers will answer five questions. He reserves the right to refuse to answer at any given time. If you push him or break the rules of civil speech, you will be escorted out of the Tower and banned from returning,” she recites, making a short pause to let the warning sink in. When no one speaks up to argue, she nods. “You may ask your questions,” she says and steps back to stand behind Steve, in the far left corner of the stage.

If Steve thought the previous din was unbearable, it’s a pleasant trickle of noise in comparison to the pandemonium that breaks out now. The reporters are battling for Steve’s permission to speak like there’s no tomorrow, wildly waving their hands clutching assortments of various notepads in the air in a frenzy to be the most noticeable, and, entirely overwhelmed, Steve points to the first person his eye zeroes in on.

He gets his first proper look at the woman when she stands from her seat in the third row. She’s coming up on forty, with straw-blond hair pulled back into a severe bun and a mouth that’s turning down on the corners, a sign of her dislike to smile. Steve knows the type; wry, haughty, riding his ass for every littlest mistake he has and hasn’t made as though it’s her given right.

The overhead mics pick up the click of the woman’s heels as she smooths down her grey pencil skirt and stares Steve straight in the eye. He braces himself for the worst.

“Captain Rogers,” she says in the room’s sudden hush, and Steve instantly gets the impression she’s only referring to him by his rank not to be thrown out for using something strictly different. “How would you address the allegations of your engaging in improper physical contact with a male in a public space?”

 _Straight to the point_ , Steve thinks bitterly.

It’s not that he didn’t expect it - he knew from the moment Pepper called him in that he would be facing down hatred wrapped in fancy words, but some faint flicker of doubt in his head held on the the hope that perhaps he would wind up in a circle of people that had no burning acid to spit at him.

This is, of course, not the case.

Steve squares his jaw and folds his hands on the table. If he can’t help being attacked, he’s going to damn well fight back. “Well, ma’am,” he starts, drawn up to his full six-foot-something in the flimsy chair. He’ll have to ask Tony for an upgrade, because _Christ_. “I don’t see how it needs to be addressed. If I were to be with a woman, everyone would be overjoyed, so why should the fact that it’s a man I’m in love with change anything?”

The journalist looks like she wants to say something, mouth pursed in displeasure, but Steve plows on. Usually, he doesn’t have a clue and a half about what he’s supposed to say during those damned conferences, but today the words are coming to him like they’ve always been ready to be spoken. “Gender doesn’t matter, what counts is that me and my partner respect each other and hope to build a healthy relationship. I don’t understand why what’s in either of our pants should concern anyone but us.”

The woman’s face is a sight to behold - tight with silent fury, a hilarious twitch in her right cheek. Her knuckles have gone white on the spine of her green Moleskine. Steve wonders if he broke her.

He doesn’t have to wait long for her response, though.

“That so-called ‘healthy relationship’ goes directly against God. Captain,” she grits out, the title obviously an afterthought meant to paint her as more courteous than she is. Steve chuckles dryly; if he got a penny for each time he’s heard that, he’d easily double Stark’s fortune.

He stopped believing in the Savior up in the sky with the very second of his mother’s untimely death, so Steve finds it exceptionally easy to drawl, “Then you can go tell him yourself that I’ll happily go to Hell if it means I get to be with my fella in peace.”

This time, he notes with satisfaction, he definitely made the woman’s software overheat. Her mouth is flapping open and closed like she’s a fish on a desert, her neck littered with red splotches, and Steve prepares himself for being cursed out, but she only closes her mouth with a snap of her teeth and jerks her head in a poor rendition of a nod, quickly returning to her seat.

The stunned hush doesn’t last for longer than a fraction of a second before the room falls into an uproar once again. Mentally cracking his knuckles, Steve searches the throng of people for another face to give voice to. Further back, not in the last rows but definitely not the first, either, he spots a tall, thin man with hollow cheeks, sticking a bony arm out into the air, waving a red pen. He’s got sort of a rat quality to him, like a sized-up, emaciated Zola, and if Steve picks him solely to indulge the guy in the fight he’s undoubtedly looking for, that’s no one’s fault but his own.

The journalist stands, tucking the pen into a small notebook he slides out of his pants’ back pocket.

“Do you think homosexuality is a modern distortion, and you’re conforming to it to adapt to life in the XXI-st century?” he asks, all cocksure, the outline of an ugly scowl seemingly a permanent feature of his, and _fuck_ , Steve would love to punch his teeth in so he’d never spew his bullshit again. _Modern distortion, my ass,_ Steve thinks, gritting his teeth. The guy is going to get slammed with a history lesson, pissed-off-Steve Rogers style. Sans the violence, sadly, but he’ll make do.

“No, sir, I don’t think homosexuality is an exclusive part of modern culture,” Steve begins, nice and slow. “Nor is it a distortion, for that matter. The only distortion here is how abnormally narrow your mind is, but that’s not really what you asked me about, if I recall correctly,” he adds, innocent, internally high-fiving himself for the outraged scowl that blooms on the journalist’s face upon the nonchalantly tossed insult. In Steve’s ear, one of the PR team is warning him to pay close attention to his choice of words. “I’ve been bisexual ever since I remember, and already when I was growing up, New York’s LGBT scene was thriving. If only I wanted, I could list you every gay bar whose threshold I’ve stepped over before you were even born.”

Steve leans back in his chair, lazily surveying the man in front of him and his steadily hardening expression. God, Steve’s enjoying this, the playing cat-and-mouse with corporate idiots struggling to jump-start their pay grade.

“And even if it was a ‘new thing’,” Steve says, complete with pointed air quotes, “I don’t think it would make a difference regarding its validity. You can discover a new part of yourself at any day. I knew a woman who didn’t realize she was a lesbian until her early forties.”

Steve met Ms O’Haare in one of the secret jazz clubs in Flatbush when he was seventeen; she was a lively black woman with a snapping wit and a heart of gold, always clad in bright dresses patterned with flowers. Her husband had died seven years prior in an unfortunate accident at the docks, leaving her alone with their toddler. After Sarah’s death, she took Steve under her wing with no hesitation - she cooked for him, mended his shirts, scolded him for not wearing a thick enough coat in February, essentially acting as the mother he wasn’t meant to lose so early.

Steve had watched Mike, Ms O’Haare’s son, learn to read, he’d been witness to him throwing furious tantrums of an unsatisfied eight-year-old, he had been there when the boy unearthed his love for drawing. When Steve shipped out, Mike was an exuberant teenager, excitedly telling Steve about his first kiss with Rowan Scrope in a hushed voice so his mother wouldn’t hear.

Steve wrote them letters from the front every chance he got, until he was swallowed down by the duties of Captain America.

When he came out of the ice, hopeless and raddled, one of the first tasks he went about was tracking down the O’Haare family line. After weeks of searching, he managed to meet his foster mother’s descendants; in an innocuous brownstone in downtown Queens, he shed tears of both grief and joy, wrapped in the frail arms of Mike, a smiling gentleman at the ripe age of eighty two. With shining eyes, Steve shook hands with his three children and their numerous offspring, all gathered together to meet their grandfather’s old friend.

For the first time in that new, chrome-and-glass century Steve felt welcome. Safe.

Steve clears his throat to chase away its sudden tightness. “Does that answer your question?”

The interviewer smiles, fake and nasty, as he goes to sit down. Steve imagines that the article the man’s going to write will paint him in a highly unflattering light, to say the least. “Yes. Thank you.”

Not sparing the man another second (a ‘you’re welcome’ would indicate him being so), Steve points to another man - a young black guy standing off towards a wall, dressed in camel-colored slacks and a white shirt. He’s easy on the eye, well-groomed, and though Steve hates to judge people based on their appearance, the man makes a pleasant first impression. He reminds Steve of Sam, if he learned the pros of a decent pair of pants other than jeans.

Any initial sympathy Steve might have felt for the journalist evaporates when he, with absolutely no preamble other than enabling the recording app on his phone, asks, “In the wake of current events, would you care to elaborate on the nature of your past relationship with Peggy Carter?”

Steve is a private person on the whole, and Peggy is one of his sore points. Since the fucking dawn of time, everyone has assumed the two of them to be involved, simply because they were two attractive people who just happened to be a man and a woman in a world starved for gossip. No matter how frequent their assurances of a firm lack of romance between them were, the public was keen on putting them together like a dog salivates at the sight of a bone, stubbornly enough to make Steve and Peggy stop clarifying.

Steve looks forward to a time where a woman can treasure a friendship with a man without being presumed to sleep in his bed at night every step of the way.

“What connected me and Peggy, Agent Margaret Carter to you,” Steve says firmly, and the reporter at least has the decency to look abashed, “was a strictly professional relationship. She was a brilliant strategist and an outstanding soldier, and I wish for that to be acknowledged first when she’s spoken about, not whether she engaged in an affair with a male colleague or no. Same goes for every woman.”

Steve might have branched out from the topic of the conference, but going by the appreciative look on the female half of his audience’s faces and the begrudging voice in his earpiece telling him not to stray from the course with less contempt he would’ve expected, it isn’t too big an error.

“Thank you, sir,” the interviewer says, a couple notches more sincere than his predecessor. Steve musters up a nod for him; the guy got off on the wrong foot, but surely he means well.

 _Two left_ , Steve reassures himself, pointing to a slight Asian woman in the first row who caught his eye when he was weaving together an answer to the previous question. She’s wearing a bold choice of a bright red turtleneck combined with swaying pom pom earrings in the same color, her brown hair curled into soft waves falling past her shoulders, and with her subtle makeup, she doesn’t look to have crossed the milestone of twenty three yet.

The girl tucks a wayward lock behind her ear, consulting her phone one last time before looking Steve in the eye. Her face is open, shy, and he sends her an encouraging smile. He has a good feeling about the question she’s prepared, only backed up by the glossy enamel heart pinned to her sweater, filled with the pink-and-orange stripes of the lesbian pride flag.

“Captain Rogers,” she says, “do you have a message you’d like to share with the world’s LGBT youth?”

Steve’s smile only widens. “That’s an excellent question,” he says. The girl grins bashfully.

Steve falls silent to think his response through. To gather all he would have liked to hear when he was a kid, lost and confounded by the big world’s notions; to construct an answer that has the potential to save someone’s life.

He drags a deep breath into his lungs, then slowly lets it out. “There’s nothing wrong with you," he says. "Embrace what makes you different. Take pride in who you are.” His voice grows strained as he remembers the raid on a small, darkly-lit club in Dumbo on a humid August night. The panicked eyes, the shaking hands. The violent despair of those whose wrists have been bound, kicking and screaming in fright. The creaking backdoor he was rushed through to relative safety by someone who already knew how to hide. “Sometimes, it may feel like there’s no one there for you, that you’re hopeless, but I want you to know some day, you’ll find your joy."

He thinks of all the kids cowering in doorways not to be jumped for not fitting in with the whole. Of the kids harming themselves out of self-directed loathing, of kids forcing themselves into boxes they don’t fit into to hold out unscathed.

“You’ll find people who love you for who you are,” he says. “You’ll see that life is worth living, and that all your suffering paid off. I want you to believe me, and to never be ashamed.”

Steve doesn’t wipe away the moisture gathering at the corners of his eyes; he’s been playing unbreakable long enough.

Down the young reporter’s face slides a tear, tinted dark with mascara. She raises a knuckle to her eye and gathers the wetness up carefully not to smudge her studious makeup. In her lap, her other hand is trembling, wedged between her knees in an attempt to conceal the tremor.

The room is deathly quiet.

“Thank you, Captain,” she says, a slight rasp to her voice, and though she struggles, she smiles, a small, vulnerable curve of glossy lips. Steve smiles back, catching salty pearls of water in the corners of his mouth as they trickle down towards his chin.

“‘S no trouble,” he replies.

There’s a second or two of silence after that, even the most ruthless columnist vultures understanding the meaningful precariousness of the moment, but then the noise starts up again, building back to its previous volume. Reminding himself that the following is the last question he needs to get through before he’s free, Steve picks a guy standing squeezed between a wall and the throng of strangers who share his profession.

Similarly to the girl before him, the kid can’t be far from twenty - he’s maybe a couple of inches taller than Steve used to be, with an amiable round face speckled with freckles. He pushes his glasses in thin tortoiseshell frames higher up the bridge of his nose as he steps forward, and when Steve nods in a gesture of encouragement, the guy flushes a dusty pink. _Huh._

“Sir,” he says. Steve can’t shake the feeling that he could render the kid speechless with one well-timed wink. “Your boyfriend… What is he like?” the boy asks shyly, and all of a sudden, Steve doesn’t recoil at the overt familiarity of the question like he usually would.

“He’s extraordinary,” he finds himself saying before he can parse the words, lips perking up at the mere thought of Bucky - his elaborate routine performed to Toto’s _Africa_ while making banana pancakes for breakfast, a silicone spatula an extension of his flailing arms. His speeding through the countless notes taken during his Molecular Biology course that Steve couldn’t comprehend if someone paid him. All the big and little things that make Bucky, Bucky (including his raging aversion to tofu). “He’s wickedly smart, outspoken, full of life… Always makes me laugh. He’s everything I’ve ever wished for, and the fact that I’m the one he calls his comes to me as a shock each day.”

The kid smiles, and the wrinkles that form at the corners of his eyes showcase the true joy behind it. “That’s amazing.”

Steve laughs. The pale blush resurfaces on the apples of his interviewer’s cheeks.

“He is,” Steve says, and when the hubbub returns in full force, Tala steps forward from where she’s been hovering at the back of the stage. She raises her hands in front of her torso, wordlessly placating the crowd begging for more questions to be crammed in. They refuse to be tamed, but she seems not to notice.

“Thank you for attending, that will be all,” she says, stoic as ever, and catches Steve’s eye, jerking her head almost indiscernibly to the side as a command to follow her. He gets up from his table with a nod to his audience, and Tala, pushing through the loud mass of people, escorts him backstage.

Before Steve can wonder whether Bucky hung back to catch the entire conference, he’s got an armful of smugly grinning boyfriend.

“I’m extraordinary, huh?” Bucky drawls as a hello, pulling Steve close by the lapels of his suit, and Steve, wrapping his arms around Bucky’s waist in return, heaves a mock-groan. Bucky is going to be making fun of him for being soft for days to come, but really, he couldn’t care less.

“I take it back,” Steve says firmly. Bucky laughs, only tightening his fingers on the black cashmere-and-wool mix.

“You can’t,” he murmurs, right before he tugs Steve in for a sweet, sweet kiss.

Within the next five hours, the tag _otp: he’s extraordinary_ is trending on Twitter.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [Tumblr](https://lattelyy.tumblr.com)!


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